During the lockdown, we have entirely redesigned our website. It’s light, zippy, user-friendly and fully responsive for all devices. Check it out here.

Here at IT Club, our team loves the mobile-first approach. Starting to design from the smallest screen first, helps you display your content nicely and reflow it to work with any devices it can be viewed on.

A few things that need to be considered:

👉 The size of all links, buttons, and components should be made easy to interact with;

👉 Providing users with the same content on mobile, as they would have access to on their computers, and avoiding any content loss while working within mobile constraints;

👉 Performance. This is especially important for mobile, as the weight and load times of pages are limited due to the bandwidth restrictions on mobile devices.

Keep scrolling 👇

That’s why, to renovate our website, we decided to use Gridsome as it is awesome for simple websites.

Gridsome allows you to build a static generated website. This means that you don’t need to pay for hosting if you are using Vercel or Netlify. A sweet deal, isn’t it? 

Gridsome is powered by Vue.js 💙. This allows us to write our code on Vue, and connect various existing plugins for the important things necessary for a static website, such as Markdown, sitemap generator and others. 

Also, Gridsome uses a single GraphQL data layer to get data from different sources. So, all the content can be fetched during the build stage, and HTML is generated along with the data. This gives us a static generated website, which works extremely fast.

Another advantage of using Gridsome is that when users switch between pages, the routing is done on the client-side (in the browser). This increases the website’s speed and performance in comparison to server-side rendering, making the website work as a hybrid app. This means that the first page is given in HTML and then it uses JavaScript. When the scripts are fully loaded, JavaScript begins to work in a SPA-mode (single page application) but with prerendered content. 

To sum up, Gridsome helped us build a website we are proud of, with great user experience and performance, while also gaining us some cost-effectiveness due to free hosting.

Want a swift, fast-loading website? Get in touch, I’m happy to help.

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Credits:

Mockups: https://www.ls.graphics/

Design and web development: https://itclub.com.au/

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Thank you for viewing 💙